Digital Single Market

Digitisation & Digital Preservation

The European Commission promotes the debate and monitors the implementation of the Recommendation on the Digitalisation and Digital Preservation. The progress reports by country are available for consultation on this page.

Online accessibility of Europe's digital culture requires the right conditions for proceeding with digitisation, online accessibility and the preservation of cultural content.

The European Commission fuels the policy debate and brings stakeholders together to improve the framework conditions for digitisation and digital preservation through the Commission’s Recommendation of 27 October 2011 on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation.

Monitoring the progress made by Member States

The Commission monitors the progress made by the Member States in implementing the Recommendation with the help of a Member States' Expert Group, which brings together civil servants and representatives of cultural institutions from each Member State.

The Commission Recommendation invites the Member States to inform the Commission every two years of action taken in response to it.

Member States regularly report on the progress they are making by implementing the 2011 Recommendation on digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation, and its predecessor. Member States are moving forward progressively but a lot has still to be achieved.

The Recommendation

The Recommendation invites Member States to:

Put in place solid plans for their investments in digitisation and foster public-private partnerships to share the gigantic cost of digitisation (recently estimated at € 100 billion). The Recommendation spells out key principles to ensure that such partnerships are fair and balanced.

Make 30 million objects available through Europeana by 2015, including all Europe's masterpieces which are no longer protected by copyright, and all material digitised with public funding.

Reinforce their strategies and adapt their legislation to ensure long-term preservation of digital material, by -for example- ensuring the material deposited is not protected by technical measures that impede librarians from preserving it.

In the Annex to its conclusions, the Council sets out a number of priority actions as well as an indicative timetable for work by the Member States in the years 2012-2015 in order to achieve these objectives.